


Lethe

by thedevilchicken



Category: The Chronicles of Riddick Series
Genre: Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, Drinking, Drunk Sex, Enemies to Lovers, Explicit Sexual Content, Fights, Imprisonment, Injury Recovery, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 20:52:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7189769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not a <i>good</i> plan, but it's sure as hell <i>a</i> plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lethe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MissHammer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissHammer/gifts).



They're flying through space with the greatest of ease and frankly, Riddick's enjoying the ride just as much as the thought of what's coming up next. 

They have a plan. It's not a _good_ plan, but it's sure as hell _a_ plan, and as far as that shit goes it's ten times better than the seat-of-your-pants bullshit he usually pulls. Sometimes having a sidekick's a tangible bonus, even when that sidekick's an ex-Necromonger with a chip on his shoulder the size of Helion Prime. Not that he'd call him a sidekick to his face, except that time the last system back. Vaako scowled. Riddick laughed. Riddick thinks that's a pretty solid summary of what's between the two of them.

It's been three years since that crap Krone pulled on that fucked-up world that wasn't Furya. Riddick's nothing like as pissed as Vaako is but he thinks this'll make one hell of a story.

\---

When he went into the double-max on Cerulean 3, he didn't expect to run into Vaako. 

What he expected was the same shit he'd seen in every other slam from Butcher Bay to Ursa Luna, 'cause they're all just variations on a theme of controlled fucking chaos, like chaos can ever really be controlled and fuck if he ain't the living proof, in the flesh. They stuck him into the tube and the duty guard smirked as he told him he might want to consider holding his breath; they flushed him through the pipes with boxes of supply shit, flushed him down into the belly of yet another stinking fucking slam, like innovative ways to introduce new meat to the population was high in architects' priorities, almost as high as innovative fucking locations. Crematoria is a scorched earth wasteland. Cerulean is a sea world with no fucking land in it at all.

He spilled out into a pool in the center of the underwater structure like the place was a goddamn convicts' day spa and pulled himself up and out at the side of it, hacking up a lungful of half-stagnant water. The pressure had swept off his damn goggles so who the hell knew where they'd wound up, probably the bottom of the pool or caught up in the fucking tube, and the place was lit up inside just like the three goddamn suns on M6-117 before the long-ass night. He hadn't seen that shit coming. He'd seen a lot but he hadn't expected to get flushed down the john like some poor kid's ex-goldfish. 

"We got fresh meat down here!" someone called, fuck knew from where 'cause the water in his ears made the whole place sound ironically like the inside of a fishbowl. Someone shoved past his shoulder once he'd dragged himself up to his feet with a squelch of soaked boots and soaked socks inside them. Someone kicked at the back of his knees and he hit the floor again, water still trickling down his neck, but the overriding feeling was the flare of pain at the boot to his tendons then the concrete scuffing the heels of his hands. He heard footsteps, lashed out, hit air, his ears still fucked up and his eyes fucking useless in that over-bright light. He's good, sure, but even he's not _that_ good. 

"Hey, you know we leave the new arrivals be," said another voice. 

"At least till the morning after," said another, deeper, sounding amused. "You're so desperate to kick his ass, you can fucking wait or you'll explain it to the Colonel." 

The footsteps marched away - or at least he guessed they did - and Riddick took a breath, wincing at the feel of it. Breathing in water has never been his thing. That shit hurts like a bitch. And such, he guessed, was his welcome to Cerulean.

He spent the night or the day or what the fuck ever period of time it was lurking there by the pool, drying off though the temperature in the place was pretty damn low. He'd seen it all, from the blistering fucking heat of Crematoria to places where they liked to keep the heat down low just to see if that kept the crazies quiet, though it never really did. He shivered, wrapped his arms around himself, wondered how the fuck he was going to do this if he couldn't even see, and toyed with the idea of getting back into the pool, diving, raking the bottom with his hands to see if he could dredge up his damn goggles like diving for pearls. He might've, too, except who the fuck knew how deep it was, who the fuck knew how wide it was, and he was pretty sure he could hear something in there, breaking the surface every now and then. The last thing he needed was to get eaten up by some fucking prison monster before he could even try to escape. That wasn't in his plan.

He slept in fits and starts, snatched a few minutes while everything was quiet just the way he'd learned in all the other places, one ear open if not one eye thanks to the light. And then, in the morning or whatever the hell it was by whatever time scale, he woke to footsteps and voices, ten men, twenty, who the fuck even knew. Even with the water drained out of his ears the place was like one big damn echo chamber, every sound ricocheting off of five different surfaces before it got to him like that shit was _meant_ to be confusing. Maybe it was. Hell, he guessed he'd seen worse. 

Several pairs of hands all closed on him and they hauled him to his feet. He let them. He let then jostle him away from the place where he'd slept, seeing them in sun-hot ice-pick flashes in his squinted shined eyes through his lashes, the same kind of guys he'd seen in slams across the whole entire universe. There was nothing new about them, nothing particularly distinguishing, same clothes, same damn faces with the same damn expressions on them. When they told him to fight, even that was pretty much as he'd expected. In places like that, the strong guys are always up near the top of the heap - strong guys and smart guys, and Riddick likes to think he's both. People tell him he is, even if it's at the point of a knife.

He broke the first guy's arm even though he couldn't see. He jabbed the point of his elbow into the next guy's larynx after that and he heard him drop to the floor with a wheeze. He kicked down hard and the next guy's knee and heard it pop the wrong damn way and next, he had his arm around the next one's throat when he felt the knife go in. It wasn't sharp so it really tore more than it cut. Then they knocked him out cold before he could go right ahead and kill the guy. So much for a fair fight, he guessed, as he was slipping out of consciousness. 

When he woke, he was tied down tight on his back in what smelled a whole lot like a med bay. He pulled and felt metal cuffs bite down at his wrists. He kicked out and found the same damn thing. Evidently he was going nowhere fast.

"The restraints are for your own protection," Vaako said. He knew the voice. He placed it instantly. When Vaako pushed Riddick's goggles into place and dimmed the light screaming in his eyes to something more like a dull roar, he looked up to find his recognition proved correct. His appearance had kinda changed but fuck, it was definitely Vaako.

Riddick groaned. It was _not_ a successful first day.

\---

They had him fight again the next morning. 

Vaako unlocked the cuffs at Riddick's wrists and hands and they dragged him out of the medical bay though he wasn't trying to resist, dragged him back out into the yard, and through the pushing and the shoving and the fucking unwashed crowd of inmates the screws had apparently let loose running the asylum, he looked around and took it in. It was one big hall under a fucked-up glassy dome and he'd've bet dollars to donuts that was the fucking ocean up above them on the other side. The only way in or out seemed to be the tube that let out into the big-ass pool in the center, and as they passed it Riddick couldn't see the bottom. All he _could_ see were shapes down there in the black, twisting beneath the water. 

They had him fight again and this time he was substantially less disadvantaged. He hadn't been able to ask how Vaako had gotten his goggles back or why he'd done it, or even what the fuck the guy was doing there - hell, he'd barely even recognized him for that first moment he'd seen him till his eyes had properly adjusted, Vaako's hair grown down past his ears and tied back behind his head, and an ugly-ass beard all patchy across his chin like someone'd stuck it on so he could wander around incognito. But the purification scars were both there at his neck. It was Vaako. He was pretty sure he was even there watching in the yard when he started his first fight. He finally _knew_ he was there when Vaako came to take away the first guy he beat, checking his snapped wrist just like a motherfucking medic. That shit had to be a joke. 

Of course, of fucking course, there was no sense of honor to the fighting. The next fight was two on one, big guys, tough guys, guys with knives, in the center of a human circle that jostled him whenever he got too close. They cut him up, kicked him, took it out on him whenever he landed a punch. Bleeding from the mouth and the back and six or seven gashes down his forearms, bleeding on his feet after the fourth fight then on the floor after the fifth, he guessed he understood: it looked a whole lot like the others fought for better food, for better clothes, better weapons, but right at that moment they were all just trying to show Riddick his place. They were showing him who was boss, and the boss was an unassuming guy there on the sidelines, diminutive, balding, directing play with the only gun in the place. They were showing Riddick his name meant nothing there. He'd been through all that shit before, he knew the routine well. 

Then two guys took him by the arms and dragged him, the toes of his boots scraping lines against the concrete, back into the medical bay where he'd spent the previous night. Vaako was there under the stark white lights that hurt his eyes even through his goggles and when he'd finished jabbing the groaning guy in the next bed with what Riddick guessed must've been a sedative, Vaako turned to him. He changed his gloves. He prodded at a gash over Riddick's forearm, one that was bleeding all over his pants as he sat there, and it made him hiss and laugh and curse. 

"This needs stitches," Vaako said, and he turned away to find a needle. Riddick sat there and he watched him thread it. Riddick sat there and he watched him sew. 

"I thought Necros didn't grow beards," Riddick said. "Doesn't purification take care of that shit?"

"They don't," Vaako replied, glancing up from Riddick's arm just for an instant. "It does." But he wouldn't answer a single question more, as many as Riddick asked, all casual-like. All he said as he sewed was, "They'll make you fight till you're dead or you're broken. That's how it is when they get names here that're bigger than the Colonel's."

Riddick lay there after, stretched out on a bed in the weirdly spotless med bay, and wondered what the fuck it was he'd stumbled into. Vaako brought shitty food a while later and wouldn't engage with him at all, then he did rounds with the six other guys in there like a proper fucking doctor while Riddick watched, white coat and gloves and all that shit. It was weird, considering how hot the Necros really aren't on doctors, medicine, stitches, painkillers, bandages. They don't exactly need 'em: they win or they die, and sometimes they don't seem to care much which it is.

Under the med bay lights as he turned to leave the room, Vaako looked years older. Jesus Christ, he really looked _older_. There was gray in his hair, like Necromongers had found a way to age when they were pretty much ageless, and when he asked him what the fuck precisely he was doing there, Vaako just glanced at him as he dabbed at his cuts with fucking stinging antiseptic. 

He didn't answer.

\---

They had him fight again the next morning. 

He fucked up the first two guys but the second two brought him down, made him bleed, split his lip just off center, broke his nose and made him curse. He wound up back in Vaako's med bay, dripping blood from his face into a kidney dish while Vaako shifted the cartilage back into place. Vaako didn't say a word before he walked away.

After, he got the drugged-up convict in the next bed to talk, though the guy was in and out of consciousness. He got him to say he'd been there when Vaako had arrived, he'd seen him fight like a pro then he'd seen how he'd set a guy's broken arm, seen him splinting another guy's fingers, cauterizing wounds, sewing guys up, till eventually the Colonel had made him their go-to guy for medicine. They exempted him from fighting except for once or twice a month 'cause who the hell in his right mind wanted to fuck up the doc till he couldn't fix you up right after? They'd set up the old medical bay just how it'd been intended and then given it to him, brought all the stolen shit back in and when med supplies came down the tube, instead of fighting some twisted-ass tournament for them they just sent them on to him. Sure, the Colonel's guys still got treated first, but the system was fairer than it'd ever been before, the guys said. Vaako had made it that way. In a fucked-up way that sounded like something the son of a bitch would do, saving his own ass by saving others'.

They had him fight again the morning after that and then the morning after that, and then the morning after _that_. Afterwards, they dragged his bleeding ass back in and heaved him up onto the bed, and there was Vaako, waiting. 

"So, the Necros send you here?" Riddick asked after the fights on day five. 

"Of course not," Vaako replied, stone-faced. "Don't be absurd." 

It was the most he'd said in days. Of course, in all the time he'd known the guy, Riddick would never exactly have called him a Chatty Cathy. 

They had him fight again the next morning, even though it was obvious that he could barely stand. He was used to people fucking him up, or trying to, but this was beyond a goddamn joke, all the cuts and the goddamn bruises, though so far they hadn't broken bones. Frankly, he wasn't sure how much longer he was going to keep it up before he had to abandon ship. Cerulean had turned out to be pretty spectacularly shitty, even if he'd still had worse. 

"Where'd you learn to do that?" Riddick asked on day eight. 

Vaako sighed behind his surgical mask, not that the room was even close to sterile so it was pretty much just a waste of a mask. The guy whose foot he was taking off was knocked out cold so he couldn't scream. Vaako was pretty handy with the scalpel, not that that came as some huge goddamn surprise. 

"I don't know," he said. 

"You weren't a surgeon before?"

"Before what?" 

"Before you were one of them." 

Vaako paused, blood all down his apron, blood all over his gloved hands, swiped over his mask. "I don't remember what I was before," he said. "None of us do." And that was that.

They made him fight the next day and even with the super-fucking-speedy way he healed, thank his Furyan blood, he was still pretty fucked up after. Then he got his ass dragged back to the med bay and Vaako shook his head at him. 

"They're going to kill you," Vaako said, flat-out, no ceremony, not even like he cared one way or the other. 

"I hate to break this to you, but they're not the first who've tried." Riddick replied. He shifted, stretched out with a groan on his back. "Hell, you sent your fucking errand boy Krone to blow me away."

"If I'd wanted you dead, I'd have done it myself," Vaako said, hotly, and the way he said it, Riddick thought maybe he believed him. "You know how it works. We believed Krone had killed you. He became Lord Marshal after you and cast me out."

"And your wife?"

"No longer my wife." Vaako's jaw clenched. " _His_."

Riddick raised his brows, then he shrugged and closed his eyes under his goggles. "Sucks to be you, I guess," he said. 

Vaako snorted, maybe even half amused, but it seemed he had no more to say. He walked away.

\---

It went on for three weeks, then four, till Riddick was starting to think there was more of his blood on the gauze in the med bay trash than there was left in his body. Even Vaako seemed vaguely impressed he hadn't croaked.

One morning, the Colonel's guy stepped down on Riddick's hand till his fingers broke, and after that Vaako sat him down on what was pretty much Riddick's own goddamn personal sickbed by then and set them, splinted them, and turned to leave. 

"You got anything to drink down here?" Riddick called after him. 

Vaako turned back with a frown. "They make moonshine," he said, and winced for the briefest of moments. "I wouldn't recommend it." But when he walked away into his office at the far end of the bay, the steel-framed glass door that always had its blinds let down and tilted closed, he turned back and paused. "I have some. I've been using it as cleaning fluid but if you're determined to make yourself blind..."

Riddick grinned though it reopened the split there in his bottom lip. He dragged himself up and he followed him in. 

By the look of things, Vaako lived like a Necromonger, spartan and stark, though Riddick guessed he could've had a whole lot more if he'd just asked for it. There was a bed in there, some papers on a high desk with no chair at it, scalpels, stacks of medication that he kept inside in case his patients decided to get handsy. Riddick sat himself down on the bed since there was a total fucking lack of other seating to be found. Vaako poured two beakers of foul-smelling liquid from a big, half-empty glass bottle and then sat down next to him with a shift of the mattress. 

It tasted as foul as it smelled - it smelled pretty fucking foul - and it burned every inch of the way down. Vaako coughed. Riddick spluttered. Then they poured out two more drinks that didn't taste any better. Riddick thought the third one kinda did, or maybe the first two had just started to kill off his tastebuds. 

He woke half-naked in Vaako's bed the next morning and then threw up on his knees into the nearby john. Vaako's eyes were red-rimmed and squinty with the light when he'd finished and looked at him. 

"For fuck's sake don't tell me we..." Riddick said, trailing off with a wave of his fucked-up hands. 

"We didn't," Vaako said, flatly, while he pulled on his shirt over his pale-ass Necro chest, but the bruises turning purple there at Vaako's hips looked a whole lot like the shape of Riddick's hands. And when the Colonel's guys came for Riddick not long after, Vaako followed close behind. When they got out into the yard, it became pretty obvious why he had: he fought once or twice a month, the guy in the next bed over had said. Apparently, that once or twice a month was _that_ day. 

It was when they fought that it made sense and clicked into place. They'd fought before, they'd fought with knives and huge fucking axes and tried to smear each other's faces right across the floor; they'd fought in the training room in private between attempts on Riddick's life as Lord Marshal, done it with weapons and with their bare hands. Riddick remembered getting his fingers around Vaako's throat 'cause hell, even Necros still needed to breathe to stay alive just the same as anyone else did. He remembered how they'd fucked each other up till they were breathless and flushed and on the verge of something else that maybe wasn't a million miles removed from fighting, at least not the way Riddick liked to do it. And then, in a deep-sea slam on Cerulean 3, there they were again.

Vaako had been just as strong as him back with the fleet, just as fast, maybe stronger, maybe faster, maybe tougher, who the fuck even knew when it came down to it, maybe Riddick had just gotten lucky. But then, even limping, even and cut and bloodied and reeling from the dumbest fucking hangover of his entire life, Riddick could tell there was a difference in him. It wasn't that he'd suddenly turned into some shitty-ass third-rate fighter after being top of the Necromonger class, and maybe it could've been explained away as lack of practice or some other such happy bullshit, but Riddick could tell even if no one else could. Even when Vaako's fist hit his face, when Vaako's forearm smashed his still-healing nose, when Vaako's elbow came down on the back of his neck and sent him tumbling to his knees on the concrete, he could tell. With every blow Vaako landed he hurt himself hyst as much as he hurt Riddick, bruised his knuckles, jarred his bones, strained his muscles. Every blow that Riddick landed hurt him, too, made him wince, made him bare his teeth and set his jaw. He understood.

They went back to the med bay after, Vaako's arm round Riddick's waist to hold him up. Then Riddick watched him clean the blood from his own face in front of the mirror, watched him spit a mouthful of it out into the sink then wash it down 'cause if there was one thing they absolutely didn't lack on their weird-ass freshwater ocean planet it was running water, even if they had to boil it first to drink. And that night, after the patients had eaten their crappy half-cooked food and drifted into sweet sedation, Vaako left the door to his office ajar when he left. Riddick took it in the spirit with which it was very clear that he intended; he limped his way across the room and joined him. There was a glass of toxic moonshine waiting. He took a seat on the bed.

"Krone found a way to reverse the procedure," Vaako said. His cheek was bruised and his left eye was swollen but that wasn't where Riddick was looking. He'd got his eyes on the scar at one side of Vaako's neck. _That_ was the difference, of course it was. 

"No shit," he said. 

Vaako looked at him sharply, then he shook his head and drank instead of taking that line further. "Have you ever thought about how disgusting the human body is?" Vaako asked instead. "Have you thought about how freeing it is to not eat or sleep? No waste. No pain. No ageing. No disease. No memory of anything that went before."

"The son of a bitch figured exile wasn't good enough?"

Vaako sighed. "Something like that, yes." 

"So that's two of us he's screwed over." 

Vaako smiled a bitter, venomous little smile. "Yes, it is," he said. "When I get out of here, I'm going to saw out his fucking heart and eat it raw."

Riddick raised his glass, half amused, half in agreement. "I'll drink to that," he said. 

\---

He woke naked in the morning, stretched out in Vaako's bed. Vaako was just as damn naked at the mirror, poking at his swollen face. 

"So, last night," Riddick said. 

Vaako scowled at himself in the mirror, or maybe he was scowling at Riddick instead, maybe at his hangover. "No," he replied, firm, fucking adamant, but Riddick knew the bruises on him weren't all left over from the fight. There were flashes in his head of something else, not a whole lot like a dream.

He woke there again the morning after that and said, "So, last night."

"I don't think so," Vaako replied, as he was putting on his clothes, and Riddick watched him do it with his head propped up on one hand. There was a question right on the tip of his tongue about why the fuck they were both stark naked if what he was pretty sure was the case wasn't actually the case, but he bit it back. There was something fucking hilarious about seeing him squirm.

He woken there again the morning after that, his head pounding and the damn bottle damn near emptied. Vaako was face-down against the pillow right there next to him, the bed pretty much too small for the two of them side by side but it looked a whole lot like they'd tried it anyway.

"So..." Riddick said. 

Vaako turned his head, lines from the folds in the edge of the pillow case criss-crossing his cheek in a pretty damned un-Necro way. His eyes focused slowly onto Riddick, then he turned away again.

"Perhaps," he replied, his voice muffled by the pillow. 

Riddick fought one of the Colonel's goons that morning and Vaako helped him back to the med bay after, Riddick's arm around his shoulders, Vaako's arm around his waist. They bypassed the main room entirely and they went straight into Vaako's. 

"So, last night," Riddick said, as he stood there, teetering. He raised his fucked-up arm and Vaako lifted off his bloodied shirt. 

"Yes," Vaako replied, seeming all straightforward. But there was something tucked in underneath his fucking calm veneer, and Riddick saw it.

It had never gone so far before. Fuck only knew if that was all because of Vaako's mercenary ex-wife or the fact Riddick had been Lord Marshal of the Necromongers, or if they'd just hated each other so fucking much that fighting spilling into fucking had seemed like one last step too far. They'd come close to something so many goddamn times, Riddick's knife pressed up to Vaako's throat, Vaako's hands squeezed tight round Riddick's wrists or round his neck, Vaako's dumbass braid wrapped round Riddick's palm so he could yank his head back, tugging almost hard enough to pull his hair out by the root. They'd tumbled down one on top of the other, Riddick's thigh wedged hard between Vaako's or the other way around, pressed together, breathless, pumped with adrenaline right up to the gills. 

Back then it would've been easy to slap Vaako's face, to kiss him so damn hard it hurt, to pull his pants straight down around his thighs. It would've been easy to fuck on the training room floor, Vaako glowering the way he always did. When they'd fought, it'd never felt a whole lot like Riddick was Lord Marshal and Vaako his First, like a job Vaako had to do. If they'd screwed, Riddick doubted it would've felt like Vaako had done it out of some twisted sense of loyalty, either. But they'd never done it. They'd always held back. Until they'd gotten themselves hammered on slam-distilled moonshine, that was, in a med bay a mile under water. Somehow that made a twisted kind of sense. 

Somehow, knowing they'd already been there and done that made it easier, made it seem straightforward. Riddick twisted his fingers into Vaako's hair and they met in a kiss, hard and hot and tinged with blood and who even knew which one of them was bleeding anymore, or if that mattered. Vaako bit him and Riddick laughed. Riddick reached for a scalpel from the desk and Vaako let him put the tip of it straight through his shirt, let him cut it open, barely even flinched when Riddick let it nick his skin on purpose, when he pulled the sliced halves of the shirt apart, went down on his knees on the floor and licked a stripe right over his bleeding abdomen. Vaako popped open the button at the waist of his pants in response and Riddick dragged them down, caught his underwear along the way and bared him waist to thigh. 

When he sucked Vaako's cock into his mouth, Vaako groaned under his breath and pushed him back instead. "Take off your clothes," he said, so Riddick did just that, no reason not to - hell, it was even doctor's orders. Then Vaako pushed him down on his back on the bed and went with him, went over him, pressed his mouth to a neat row of stitches in his shoulder, in his side, in his thigh. He pushed down hard at Riddick's hips, sucked so hard at the inside of one thigh that it raised an angry bruise in seconds. He sucked so hard at the head of Riddick's cock just for a second that it made him yelp then laugh out loud. Then he reached for some kind of medical lube and Jesus, fuck, Vaako slicked his fingers and he slicked Riddick's cock and he stroked while he pushed his fingers up inside him, a look on his flushed face like he couldn't decide if he wanted to fuck or be fucked. 

In the end, they did both. Vaako slicked himself thickly in long strokes of his palm then he went down over him, he guided his cock up between Riddick's cheeks and he pushed inside. He fucked him slow and hard, his too-long damn hair falling out of its tie around his jaw and damp with sweat, and Riddick tangled his fingers in it as he caught his breath. He got one hand around Vaako's throat and held him there at arm's length, watching as he rocked his hips, watching Vaako's dark eyes on him, the way his cheeks flushed redder as he thrust in him so hard it made Riddick curse and push back down to meet him. He'd wanted it for a long fucking time. It seemed like they both had.

Vaako went up on his knees then, got his thighs in underneath Riddick's and fucked him that way, kneeling, watching him as his hips bucked, as skin met skin, as he wrapped one hand around Riddick's slick cock and jacked him till his balls fucking tingled. Then he pulled back. Riddick didn't ask why; he was pretty sure he knew already. Vaako straddled Riddick's hips and held his cock in place while he settled back, pressed the head up to his hole, pushed him up inside himself as far and deep as it was possible to get. Riddick reached for Vaako's thighs, braced his heels on the mattress and pushed up against him, hard. Vaako, fucking stoic Vaako, cursed under his breath and made him laugh. Vaako scowled, but the effect was pretty much lost in the moment.

They came like that, Vaako riding him hard, stroking himself till he came all over Riddick's chest and Riddick wasn't far behind, still in him, pushing deep as he squeezed Vaako's hips right where those hand-shaped bruises still were. His fingers fit them, like he'd known they would. So much for _perhaps_.

"Tell me why you're here," Vaako said after, half-breathless, flushed, with Riddick's cock still pushed up inside him. 

"You first," Riddick replied. 

"Illegal medical testing." 

"Assassination." 

"Whose?"

Riddick smiled. He positively grinned. "The Colonel's," he said. 

And Vaako, stoic fucking Vaako, broke down and laughed out loud.

\---

He hadn't meant to reel in a confederate, a co-conspirator, a collaborator. He'd meant to do the deed alone. Of course, he hadn't counted on finding Vaako there. Even if he had, he couldn't've counted on him winding up an ally.

The Colonel was some kind of big-shot mob boss on the outside and hell, it seemed the guy still was. His boys had been sending messages into slam with parcels of food and out again through the waste pipes, codes for business, codes for working their way out, codes for a jailbreak. No one _wanted_ to be locked up on Cerulean 3, after all, not when they had a fucking empire of arms and drugs and other contraband to run. Riddick wasn't even totally sure how the fuck he'd been roped in except some guy some crummy fucking bar at the ass end of the universe had said they could get a virus into the net and wipe Richard B. Riddick straight out of it, and hell if it didn't sound great not to keep on running till he bought the farm. That shit was worth one last breakout, at least. And he'd guessed even if he failed, he'd been shittier places in life.

"You've put on quite an act," Vaako said, washing himself down in the morning in front of the sink. "I almost believed you were really that badly injured."

"No you didn't," Riddick replied from the bed. "You're not a fucking idiot."

Vaako's smirk was halfway to a smile as he picked up a pair of scissors from the desk, as he started to hack chunks out of his hair. Riddick chuckled. Before the morning fights, he shaved Vaako's hair down short, shaved his face smooth, then did his own. He stood behind him with the razor, a long, straight blade, lathered his skin and took the shitty, patchy beard from Vaako's chin and neck. He pressed his mouth to one scar at the side of his neck and then the other. _Illegal medical trials_ be damned; Riddick would've laid pretty good odds right then, and still would, that the son of a bitch had tried to replicate the purification process. He'd've laid pretty good odds he'd killed while trying to perfect it. Weird how Vaako had been locked up for a handful of deaths out on backwater planets and not for the other few million. They do so love to act like Necromongers don't exist, till it's an inescapable fucking truth like a comet in the sky.

When they went out to the yard that morning, side by side, they looked pretty much like their old selves again. Riddick had a scalpel tucked into his boot. Vaako was hiding one in each sleeve. Apparently no one wondered why the dramatic change in Vaako's style, or chances were they didn't give a fuck.

When the fight kicked off, Riddick straightened up and pulled himself up tall. Every way they'd hurt him had been pretty goddamn superficial, at least as far as Riddick went. He'd had worse. He'd _done_ ten times worse, a hundred. He'd just led them all on, he'd let them get complacent, till there were six dead in forty seconds. Ten by sixty. And when the Colonel raised his contraband firearm, it was Vaako that shoved a knife into his throat, not Riddick. He bled out in seconds, all over himself and the floor at his feet as he crumpled. Riddick doubted Vaako had ever been a doctor, at least not a good one. Still, even with the purification reversed the way it clearly had been, it seemed Vaako couldn't remember anyway. Maybe he just didn't want to. Riddick could not have cared less.

"Time to go," Riddick said. "You swim, right?"

Vaako smiled. He swam. They'd be leaving together.

The things in the water were easy to neutralize: they tossed a couple of the bodies in while the rest of the whole fucking slam looked on caught someplace between horrified and just flat-out impressed. And when the tube opened, when the day's parcels flooded in, they both took a deep breath and pushed up in against the flow. The tube closed. The pressure stabilized and they swam for their fucking lives. They kicked for the surface. And when they came out at the top, gasping for breath, the guards up there were so taken the fuck aback that they didn't even have time to hit the goddamn panic button before there was a scalpel tearing through each neck.

They made a surprisingly good team. They left together, Riddick's job complete.

\---

It's been a month now since the breakout. 

Sometimes, on the outside, Riddick misses the simplicity of life in a good slam. He's seen more than a couple, after all, stayed inside for a couple of months sometimes, when the mood comes along and takes him. Still, he's broken out of all of them, one by one, almost systematically, so it's not like he's about to make a life there, not in any of them, no more than he'd ever meant to stick around there on Cerulean 3. He has a plan for what comes next. _They_ have a plan. It's not a good plan but it's still a plan: just like they said back down there under the deep blue Cerulean sea, they're going to kill Krone for what he did, to Vaako and to him. They'll have his goddamn traitor's heart on a platter.

What comes after that, who knows? Maybe they'll take Riddick's new squeaky clean ID out for a test drive right around the universe. Maybe they'll fuck up the Necro fleet or maybe they'll slip back in at the head of it and take a ride to Furya the way Riddick always meant to. Maybe Aereon's got some other bullshit prophecy for the two of them to go about fulfilling. Riddick's never been a good guy any more than Vaako has, so the idea of heroism's pretty fucking entertaining. 

Riddick shifts the ship down into autopilot and he hauls his ass up out of the pilot's seat. Vaako's in the back with a bunch of shitty MREs they'll have for dinner like they make for any kind of good eating, but they'll stop off someplace soon and pick up real food, shit that doesn't taste like wood pulp and dirt simmered in dried tarragon as old as Riddick is for flavor. It'll be three months or more till they catch up to the fleet and Riddick figures he's got time to show Vaako some of the finer things in life before he commits to getting needles jabbed into his neck again. Of course, there's a bunch of shit Vaako can enjoy even after that. Riddick intends to show him. It's sure as hell not like he's got other plans laid out.

"You took your time," Vaako says. "I thought you said you could navigate. Do you need a chart to get back here?"

Riddick snorts. "Wiseass," he says, not that he gives a fuck about that when Vaako's already tugging at his shirt. They share a bunk at night, every night, but when Vaako presses his mouth up hot to his, when Vaako yanks off Riddick's goggles then bites his lip and makes him curse and makes him laugh, down low, in his chest, he knows they're skipping dinner tonight and getting straight on down to business. That's fine by him. They've got a whole lot of time to make up for.

Naked on the mattress in forty seconds flat, Riddick settles down on top of Vaako, skin to skin, the lights down low so he can see without his goggles just as clearly as Vaako can. He slicks himself thickly, quickly, and Vaako's hands grip at his shoulders as he pushes up inside him. It hasn't gotten old.

"So, you're really gonna get re-purified and forget all this?" Riddick asks, teasing, maybe, maybe not. Eye to eye in the half-light, skin to skin pushed up inside him, so turned on he could come at the drop of a hat but fuck, they'd just do it all again a little later, it doesn't sound a whole lot like he's teasing. He doesn't care. They haven't planned that far; it's a plan but not a good plan and it only gets them back to the head of the fleet. After that, it's anyone's guess. After that, it's up for grabs.

"If I forget, you'll remind me," Vaako replies, and he shifts his hips, he pushes down against him, he takes him in just a fraction deeper. "You'll remind me _graphically_." But for once Vaako doesn't sound too sure.

Riddick grins. "I'll hold you to that," he says.

It's not a _good_ plan but it's _a_ plan. And either way they're in it deep together.


End file.
